Six years after its launch, more than 90 civil society organisations from both developed and developing countries across the globe are now urging their respective trade minister to declare the Doha Development Round “dead.”

With the most recent failure of the discussions among the G4—European Union, Unites States, Brazil, and India—over ninety civil society organisations from 35 developed and developing countries all over the world wrote their Trade Ministers to officially declare the Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) a failure.

The letter proposed that a two-year moratorium be instituted to give enough time to rethink a different model of multilateral trade. It pointed out that in six years since the Doha Agenda was launched, there was nothing but a list of setbacks and failures.

“Unfair” trade

“The failure was not just a sudden one,” Anup Shah, a trade activist, said. “The history of the Doha round has been filled with double-talk, with rich countries often demanding poor countries to concede ground in unfair ways.”

Civil society groups worldwide have united to protest the Doha Round. Farmers, fisherfolk, workers and trade unionists, environmentalists, religious groups, and other organisations denounced the Doha as having a “corporate-driven” model of trade that disregards peoples’ rights and needs.

“The ‘promise’ of development was never sincere,” the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South said. “Centred on market access, the Round simply cannot deliver development to the poorest countries.”

Not the end

The letter—which was sent as well to WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy—stated that the present model of trade could not fulfil the promise of the Doha Round, and that WTO members would never be able to agree on a deal within the present structure.

Declaring the Doha a failure, however, would not mean the end of the system, the letter added. It only means that another chance is given to think of a model and process of trade negotiations that would not prioritise the rights of corporations over the rights of people.

Alberto Villarreal, a Friends of the Earth activist from Uruguay, welcomed the news of Doha's failure. According to him, an agreement “would have meant greatly increased trade in forestry, fishing, and mining products, with devastating environmental impacts.”

The Doha Developmental Round’s launching in 2001 was followed by a collapse of the Cancun Ministerial in 2003, the July framework cobbled together in 2004, the failure of the 2005 Hong Kong Ministerial, and the recent breakdown of the G4 talks in Potsdam in July.

Related article:
“Doha Round faces yet another collapse” in we! July 2007, No.1 

Sources:
“‘Doha is dead,’ time to rethink a new model of trade” from Third World Network, posted on July 18, 2007, <http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/wto.info/twninfo070713.htm>.
“Requiem for the WTO” from Inter Press Service, posted on August 2, 2006, <http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34215>.
“WTO Doha ‘Development’ Trade Round collapses, 2006” from Free Trade and Globalization, posted on July 28, 2006, <http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/FreeTrade/dohacollapse.asp>.
“WTO draft ‘modalities’ out: No deal on the current parameter!” from Women in Development Europe, posted on July 2007, <http://www.wide-network.org/index.jsp?id=311>.